The Paper Store - Imperial War Museums
- Year
- 2019
- Type
- Cultural
- Status
- Built
- Firm
- Architype
- Location
- Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom
The Paper Store is pioneering a bold, low-carbon design solution that uses world-leading air-tightness to rethink contemporary preservation and archiving. All from a historic WW2 airfield in rural Cambridgeshire. Home to 50,000 priceless paper artefacts that tell the story of 20th-century conflict and humanity – from the Nuremberg Trial transcripts to soldiers' letters – the brief was to develop a design that would safeguard the collection for generations to come. By embedding principles of fabric-first design from the outset, and collaborating with energy consultants, Architype created a passive system that eliminated the risk and expense of complex ventilation and humidity control – and replaced it with a radically simple control strategy that delivers temperature stability and world-leading airtightness in-use, and drastically reduced running costs at a time when museum budgets are being squeezed tighter than ever.